On March 12th, my wife told me the news that would take my then generally happy marriage to being over officially on May 4th. Of course there were things we could have used to work on before then, desires and needs we each wanted to improve (some of which actually overlapped). But the morning of March 12th, I did not see the storm coming that would build over the next 6-7 weeks and eventually drown our marriage.
In retrospect, I suppose there were signs that our marriage wasn’t as grounded as I thought it was. I won’t go into the details of what went wrong…or how things got to the breaking point. We both did things during those weeks that contributed to the breaking down of our union. I know I wish I could take back a lot of the things I said and ways I acted. I’m left to question if we had been able to get into couples counseling earlier if things could have worked out differently. Most likely they wouldn’t have though. One of the major reasons she gave me was that she didn’t believe we could change the way we communicated with each other enough to meet the needs she was discovering about herself.
Now I’m left with a sense of loss. The initial anger has passed. Sure there are still moments of it…but its mainly loss. I miss my partner of the last 8 years. I miss the life we had built together. I’m grieving the loss of our future dreams…the kids we had talked about having…the places we had planned to go…the life we had planned to live.
I will need to learn to love and be loved again. I will need to learn how to trust my heart to someone again. Its going to take time. I’ve not felt this kind of heartbreak before. My friends have been a great support though. Both my close friends and friends that I don’t know so well. People have done so much to help me through these trying days and I will forever be grateful.
